Salon.com > Hoarding

Hoarding: A love story

Sat, 17 Dec 2011 20:00:00 +0000

I was excited and nervous when Jon invited me to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah with his parents. Three months into our relationship, I would finally meet his family. But on the way there, he stopped the car to warn me: His mother had a lot of stuff.

“Whatever,” I said.

“No, I mean a lot of stuff,” he said. “Vases. Plates. Newspapers.”

He had no idea how much junk it would take to impress me. Jon and I had been quite frank about our lives. But open as we were, I was terrified to tell him the truth about the mess that I came from.

The Montreal duplex where I grew up was filled with shag rugs and teak shelves overloaded with paperbacks, records and overdue library books. My mother found it impossible to throw out unused parts of Kleenex, packets of Sweet’N Low and food, period. Our kitchen counters supported towers of stale Danish and rotting bananas.

The collapse of American justice

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 20:01:00 +0000

Among the great untold stories of our time is this one: the last half of the twentieth century saw America's criminal justice system unravel. Signs of the unraveling are everywhere. The nation's record- shattering prison population has grown out of control. Still more so the African American portion of that prison population: for black males, a term in the nearest penitentiary has become an ordinary life experience, a horrifying truth that wasn't true a mere generation ago. Ordinary life experiences are poor deterrents, one reason why massive levels of criminal punishment coexist with historically high levels of urban violence.

Outside the South, most cities' murder rates are a multiple of the rates in those same cities sixty years ago -- notwithstanding a large drop in violent crime in the 1990s. Within cities, crime is low in safe neighborhoods but remains a huge problem in dangerous ones, and those dangerous neighborhoods are disproportionately poor and black. Last but not least, we have built a justice system that strikes many of its targets as wildly unjust. The feeling has some evidentiary support: criminal litigation regularly makes awful mistakes, as the frequent DNA-based exonerations of convicted defendants illustrate. Evidently, the criminal justice system is doing none of its jobs well: producing justice, avoiding discrimination, protecting those who most need the law's protection, keeping crime in check while maintaining reasonable limits on criminal punishment.

My $10,000 storage unit mistake

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 00:30:00 +0000

Earlier this year, I cleared out a storage locker jammed with the accumulated overflow of almost two adult decades -- along with some boxes of college books tossed in for good measure. This was actually my second storage locker, the successor to the Manhattan mini-storage unit that I acquired to insert some breathing space in the Upper West Side one-bedroom I rented shortly after law school. It was intended as a temporary measure, a momentary regrouping. But eight years later, when I finally packed up, the unit was still mine.

This past April, another full decade later, I watched with anxiety as movers unloaded seemingly endless stacks of boxes to the basement of my new home in Northampton, Mass. Would my books have gathered mold? Would my clothing be moth-infested? Would my sturdy law school bicycle even be functional?

And in fact, there were some disheartening moments -- a silk dress passed down from my grandmother that had simply disintegrated -- but the main reaction as I unpacked: What a bunch of junk. Here's some of what I found: a desktop computer circa 1989, with its companion dot-matrix printer. A non-working halogen floor lamp. Cartons of music cassette tapes from bands I'd forgotten existed. Boxes of law school textbooks. (And yes, some of them were dusty with mold, but really, who cared?) The list goes on. And on.

I’m a sex writer with a secret shame — hoarding

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 01:01:00 +0000

Over the past decade as a writer specializing in sex, I've dished about my erotic escapades, from threesomes to kinky parties to a date gone wrong with a Top Chef. I've posed with a freshly spanked bottom for a sex blogger calendar, masturbated on HBO's "Real Sex" and edited books like "Best Bondage Erotica 2011." Writing about my intimate life has never felt awkward. I didn't grow up with shame around sex and didn't carry any of it into adulthood. Divulging those stories, as well as fictionalizing fantasies about bukkake or webcam exhibitionism, has been a way to understand and come to terms with my desires. Because I've been so open, though, some people think I have no skeletons in my closet. And I do -- or rather, I would if the two-bedroom Brooklyn, N.Y., apartment I've lived in for over 11 years had any closets.

Instead of closets, though, I have stuff. Lots and lots of stuff. I have mountains of clothes, from Yumi Kim silk dresses to winter coats to dozens of pairs of fishnets, which live anywhere they can find a home: over doors, chairs and my couch, strewn across the floor, or crammed haphazardly into a dresser drawer. Don't get me started on the towering stacks of books that periodically fall over onto me, or the years' worth of magazine subscriptions, scrap paper, contracts and outdated VHS cassettes.

A guilty liberal confronts her stuff

Sat, 09 Jul 2011 18:01:00 +0000

Have you ever spent 10 minutes staring at a box of discolored envelopes?

I have. Rest assured: I'm confessing here, not bragging.

Just the other day in my home office, I froze dumbly before a white Pottery Barn bookcase that doubles as a supply cabinet. My cat Waldo eyed me suspiciously from his nearby window perch, as if I'd lost my mind. He was probably right. I was caught in a heady internal debate. Was it more responsible to recycle the yellowed, unusable envelopes in my cabinet, as they monopolized space inside? Or would that act be wasteful? Maybe I should save a tree and try to use them for origami? After all, earthquake and tsunami victims in Japan might be entirely without stained office supplies!

What was worse: wasting paper or wasting space? I was stuck. And paralysis was becoming a familiar repose. I was definitely wasting something -- my afternoon.

These days, we're expected to be environmentally responsible. If you don't want to be thought of as heartless, ignorant or, even worse, ultra-conservative, then you know the routine: Recycle, eat organic, drive hybrids, reuse metal water bottles, repurpose packaging, save documents in cloud space, compost and grow backyard and rooftop victory gardens. Well, maybe you do that. I actually murder plants.

“Hoarders’” unforgettable rat episode

Tue, 11 Jan 2011 15:30:00 +0000

Last night's season finale of A&E's "Hoarders" (Mondays 10 p.m./9 Central) may well have the most vivid and unsettling episode of the series, for the way that it illustrated OH MY GOD THE RATS ARE COMING OUT OF THE WALLS!

Sorry. Let's try that again.

The two hoarders featured in last night's episode were Lisa, a Fullerton, Calif., resident and extreme Cat Lady, and Glen, a Llano, Calif., homeowner who -- RATS EVERYWHERE!!!! -- has been collecting and breeding domesticated rats for years to the point where they NUMBER IN THE HUNDREDS, MAYBE THOUSANDS, OH MY GOD!

Seriously, though. The series started out concentrating on traditional, non-gothic-horror variants of hoarders, the sorts of people who stockpile antiques or dumpster-dive and cram their belongings into every available nook and cranny of their homes until the place becomes an eyesore and a public health hazard. This episode and last week's -- which concentrated on hoarders of chickens and rabbits, respectively -- amped up the ick factor. How can they possibly top this? With ferrets? Centipedes? Giant poisonous spiders?

My mother is a hoarder

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 22:01:00 +0000

My mother wasn't always a hoarder. In pictures from before I was born, I can see an almost sterile home. There is no clutter, there are wide open spaces. I was 3 years old when my mother developed an interest in antiques. Later that year, my oldest brother was killed in a car crash, and my family imploded. One brother left home, another enlisted in the Navy, another brother got involved with drugs. The youngest of the boys was in high school. My sisters were 11 and 9 when my brother died. But my mother's way of dealing with her loss was to become an "antiques collector." She was a child of the Depression, and the tendency to hold on to things hearkened back to a poor childhood. But, in reality, what she collected was mostly junk.

Inside the strange world of “Hoarders”

Mon, 06 Sep 2010 20:01:00 +0000

"I think I've always been a collector," said Kim, a pretty Southern blonde in her 30s with an easy laugh. "A collector of memories, of pictures." Kim still bristles at the term "hoarder," although that's the name of the show she appeared on last May, after a friend nominated her for the honor.

Granted, compared with many of the participants on the eminently watchable reality series, which begins its third season tonight on A&E -- a show that has featured such jaw-dropping spectacles as a couple whose house is so cluttered they move themselves and their young children into a tent in the yard and a man whose studio apartment overflows with garbage and excrement in seemingly equal amounts -- Kim is one of the least extreme cases. Kim's clutter is mostly clothing (some with the tags still attached) and paperwork brought home from her job, but it carpeted the floor of her office, joining a colony of soda cans in her living room. Part of the allure of the show is the relationship between the strangeness of hoarding, how absolutely unreasonable and destructive it is, and the familiarity of it.

Tax evader who blamed Holocaust gets 10 months

Fri, 23 Apr 2010 22:10:00 +0000

A tax evader was sentenced Friday to 10 months in federal prison after claiming his Jewish parents' experience fleeing the Nazi Holocaust drove him to compulsively hide more than $10 million in secret accounts at Swiss bank UBS AG and other offshore tax havens.

U.S. District Judge Adalberto Jordan imposed the longest sentence to date for a UBS client against 65-year-old Jack Barouh, even after giving him credit for cooperating in the ongoing investigation and belatedly attempting to come clean with the Internal Revenue Service.

Barouh pleaded guilty in February, the latest in a string of convictions won by the Justice Department after UBS last year admitted orchestrating tax evasion among rich U.S. clients and paid a $780 million fine. UBS also separately agreed to turn over more than 4,450 names of wealthy Americans suspected of dodging taxes through secret UBS accounts.

Jordan noted that Barouh has sought psychiatric help for the Holocaust compulsion, which his attorney described as the desire to "hide and hoard" assets to guard against a potential repeat of the Nazi attempt to exterminate Jews during World War II. After Barouh's family fled Austria, they settled in Bogota, Colombia, where Barouh was born.

How hoarding shows cured my hoarding

Sat, 10 Apr 2010 23:01:00 +0000

"It's just stuff." This is what my father told a reporter as he watched his condo burn down a year before his death. The reporter referred to him as "stoical," but I get it: Thanks to a faulty attic fan, his life was in flames and all he could do was stand there and watch. He had to be wondering which things he might lose, and how much it would bother him to lose them: The sweatshirt he wore in college? The book he was reading, beside the bed? Witnessing an inferno where your home once stood, the orange and red flames dancing against a clear blue sky, you might just feel awe at having escaped a fiery death. What does stuff matter, in that context?

But then this past Christmas at my mom's house in North Carolina, I struggled for weeks to sift through my father's old things, photographs of dozens of girlfriends I've never even met, old driver's licenses documenting the onset of middle age in his face, boxes of history books about the spread of Nazism mixed in with new age tomes about the flowering of self-love, reflecting his attempts to balance an interest in conquest and conflict with a desire for enlightenment. Fine to get rid of your own stuff, but how do you say goodbye to someone else's things without losing a piece of that person forever?

Speculation and the price of oil

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 14:27:00 +0000

Two Hofstra University economists have thrown down their gauntlets at Paul Krugman, regarding the ever-popular question of how much speculation has contributed to the price of oil. In his column and blog, Krugman has repeatedly noted that for speculation to make a difference in the real, daily, spot-price of oil that buyers pay for physical delivery, someone has to be taking oil off the market and holding it in expectation of future profits.

If the price is above the level at which the demand from end-users is equal to production, there's an excess supply -- and that supply has to be going into inventories. End of story. If oil isn't building up in inventories, there can't be a bubble in the spot price.
And inventory levels, asserts Krugman, have been "normal."
But a new, math-heavy, study of oil prices and speculation by Lonnie K. Stevens and David N. Sessions takes issue with Krugman, stating flat out "there is empirical evidence of hoarding in the crude oil market." (Thanks to Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed for the tip, via Naked Capitalism.)
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Help! I’m avoiding and hiding again!

Fri, 07 Apr 2006 09:39:00 +0000

Dear Cary,

I have a strange problem. I'm living in denial. I'm not sure exactly how I mean this; let me try to explain.

Logically, I know what I should do and how I should do it. My problem is, I can't get myself to behave in the way I need to in order to move ahead in my life. In fact, I'll specifically do things that I know are wrong or that I shouldn't do but I can't stop myself. I'm not talking about criminal acts, but things that jeopardize my relationships, professional and personal.

It's sort of a weird all or nothing thinking that I can't break away from. I've done this sort of thing now for the past 15 years and I can't seem to stop or change much. For instance, it extends from cases like the following -- a friend calls me, I forget to call them back immediately, the gap widens and widens, but yet the longer I leave it, the more embarrassed I am to call them back, until this friend thinks I'm mad at them and they don't know why, but still I can't acknowledge them. It's as though I feel that I'm not deserving as a friend or something. And thus the friendship ends. Nowadays I do the exact same thing with e-mail. In fact, people will send me second and third e-mails, and I'll be so certain that these people must be mad at me, that I don't even read their notes, I just ignore them. Until the friendship ends.